It’s tough to convey the frenetic energy, round-the-clock excitement and sheer scale of the International Consumer Electronic Show (CES), but the Blog Squad made it out of Las Vegas (backpacks heavy, pockets light) after a whirlwind week of chronicling the best of Broadcom’s activities.

For the folks back home, there is no real substitute for the tech industry’s greatest show on Earth. To that end, we made sure our coverage of the annual tech gathering included lots of video shot on location by our crack team of Broadcom interns, who doubled as live reporters.

Below are the videos shot on location at CES, each showcasing demos that Broadcom displayed.

Our video coverage kicked off at the Pepcom Digital Experience where Broadcom showed demos to a select group of tech media. In the clip, Mohamed Awad, director of product marketing in the Mobile and Wireless Group, talks about how his new Samsung Galaxy Gear enhances his mountain bike rides and Brian Bedrosian talks about the efforts behind Broadcom’s WICED platform:

Broadcom kicked off the show proper with a series of announcements about new 5G WiFi chips that will make the next gen wireless tech available to more consumers by expanding the ecosystem of devices that support the standard. Blog Squadder Arunav Sarkar talks with Manny Patel, director of business development, wireless connectivity combos/ wireless access:

Wearables were a top trend across the show floor and tech inside many of those emerging devices was Broadcom’s WICED™, or Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices platform, that simplifies connectivity for a host of new consumer products. Below, the Blog Squad’s Arunav Sarkar talks to Brian Bedrosian, senior director of product marketing, Mobile & Wireless Group:

As WICED expands the number of connected devices in the home, Broadcom partner Electric Imp provides a platform to connect devices to the Internet. Their product helps device-makers to efficiently and quickly deliver useful, networked consumer electronics to the marketplace. Blog Squad member Arunav Sarkar talked to the CEO of Electric Imp, Hugo Fiennes:

Broadcom experts also participated in discussions about where that tech is headed in the future. Below is a highlight reel from a panel discussion with Scott Pomerantz, senior vice president and general manager, wireless connectivity combos, Mobile & Wireless Group, who talked alongside execs from Ericsson, Boingo and the Wi-Fi Alliance in a panel entitled “Wi-Fi to NFC: What’s Next for Wireless Technology.”

Editor’s Note: Broadcom experts often weigh in on popular topics on industry sites around the Web. Below is a reprint of a story that appeared in Multi-Channel News, in which Rich Nelson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Broadband and Connectivity Group at Broadcom, talks about the rise of Ultra HD TV in 2015.

All signs indicate that the latter half of 2015 will usher in a number of service provider deployments of Ultra HD (4K) TV. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone: With the promise of a dramatically immersive TV viewing experience, consumers have been purchasing 4K TVs at an accelerating clip. The average price of an Ultra HD set has dropped at a dramatic pace since they first debuted in 2013 – falling 95% or more in some cases. Ultra HD-enabled set-top boxes are also becoming broadly available. Ultra HD content and service providers are gearing up to meet increased demand for 4K programming options.

Ultra HD TV Sales on the Rise

Falling costs are a big factor in consumer adoption of Ultra HD technology. Demand for 4K TVs is soaring worldwide as entry-level price points drop well below $1000, model availability expands, and consumers seek out the next best technology as they upgrade aging flat-panel TVs.

For example, the 80+ inch Ultra HD TVs announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2013 were priced at more than $20,000. Today, Ultra HD TVs from widely available brands such as Samsung and Sony start at just $799; Sharp and Vizio sets start at just $599.

That said, the capability to display crystal-clear Ultra HD is just one piece of the 4K ecosystem. At the heart of the technology are the enabling coding standards that allow service providers to move bit-rate-intensive Ultra HD TV through legacy pipes. The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard allows operators to transmit content at 50% of the bit rate previously required.

The forecast from multiple independent market research firms point to a dramatic rise in Ultra HD TV sales. According to ABI Research, more than 60% of U.S. homes will own an Ultra HD TV by 2020. It is possible these penetration rates could prove conservative if manufacturers make a full or near-full transition to Ultra HD.

Content is King

As Ultra HD becomes more mainstream, content developers have been working behind the scenes to prepare for the transition. Service providers such as Amazon announced its release of 4K content services in December of 2014, while streaming video provider Netflix announced its release of an expanded folio of 4K content with deployments planned for later this year. Google’s YouTube, with its new VP9 coding scheme, is also offering Ultra HD content.

Meanwhile, Ultra HD set-top boxes, a critical component in the Ultra HD infrastructure, have been announced by providers from around the globe including British Telecom, Comcast, DirecTV, DISH, Sky Deutschland, Technicolor and TiVo as well as an Android TV platform available from Freebox in France.

Clearly, 2015 is shaping up to be an exciting milestone in truly immersive TV, combining a telepresence-like experience with readily available, high-quality content, low-cost TVs and equipment.

Editor’s Note: Broadcom experts often weigh in on popular topics on industry sites around the Web. Below is a reprint of a story that appeared in Light Reading, in which Rich Nelson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Broadband and Connectivity Group at Broadcom, talks about the advantages of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard.

Historically, consumers have had limited options for home Internet, mainly over existing cable or phone lines. Although fiber deployments have been offering consumers gigabit speeds in the past year or so, it’s not widely available. That will soon change as a number of service providers have announced new gigabit services in more than 150 communities in the US. Later this year, cable companies will have the tools to offer those same gigabit speeds quickly and easily through DOCSIS 3.1 — and without tearing up the streets.

Benefits of DOCSIS 3.1

In an era where consumers demand both high-quality broadcasts and high-bandwidth streaming television content, real-time interactive gaming, and remote home monitoring, DOCSIS 3.1 brings nearly a 100x increase in the average data rate to the home. This will eventually give consumers streaming content, such as Netflix, the kind of bandwidth needed to stream Ultra HD content to multiple screens and download an entire 14GB digital movie in less than two minutes.

What’s more, DOCSIS 3.1 offers two very significant benefits to cable operators. First, DOCSIS 3.1 is 25% more efficient than earlier versions of DOCSIS. This translates to hundreds of megabits more bandwidth, without making any changes to the network. Perhaps more importantly, the new standard results in higher capacity to those networks that were already 100% utilized.

How DOCSIS 3.1 works: the nuts and bolts

Until recently, DOCSIS standards used single-carrier, quadrature amplitude modulated (QAM), 6MHz- and 8MHz-wide channels. With 64 QAM or 256 QAM specified for the downstream, this translates to data rates of 30.34 to 42.88 Mbit/s, respectively. To increase throughput, DOCSIS 3.0 introduced the concept of channel bonding. With DOCSIS 3.1, the concept of “channels” goes away entirely.

By fully optimizing spectrum, a 50% improvement in throughput can be achieved for a given frequency range. While this is huge, DOCSIS 3.1 also widens both the upstream and downstream available bandwidth, with the potential to use the full available spectrum found in the cable environment.

A stipulation is that both the network infrastructure and home cable modems must each support a minimum of two independently configurable OFDM channels, each occupying a spectrum of up to 192MHz in the downstream. The minimum modulated bandwidth is 22MHz, and the maximum modulated bandwidth is 190MHz, with each subcarrier having either 25kHz- or 50kHz-wide narrowband spacing. This means there are 7680 25kHz subcarriers or 3840 50kHz subcarriers within the allowed 190 MHz.

Two 96MHz-wide channels are assigned for the upstream, using orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). OFDMA is a variation of OFDM that assigns carrier subsets to individual users.

The key is that the parameters of each channel can be independently configured to optimize the channel based on channel conditions. So, if there’s interference at a certain frequency, that can be “notched” out and excluded from the transmission path.

Of course, the levels of modulation also increase, up to 4096-QAM in either direction. Where 64 QAM provided 6 bits of information per symbol, 4096 now provides 12 bits per symbol.

But what if the data path isn’t fully characterized or there’s spontaneous interference or signal loss or decay for other reasons? That’s where another major DOCSIS 3.1 PHY innovation comes into play: low-density parity check (LDPC) forward error correction (FEC) coding.

Almost all communications systems implement some means of detecting and recovering from an error. To date, DOCSIS has relied upon Reed-Solomon encoding, but for DOCSIS 3.1 it switched to LDPC. This increases the ability to recover signals in a noisy environment by in essence adding more redundant bits. Together with frequency and time interleaving, DOCSIS 3.1 has the one-two punch of both avoiding and compensating for the loss of data.

Is the market ready?

Operators such as Comcast Corp. and Liberty Global Inc. have already embraced DOCSIS 3.1 with plans to deploy it live and in the field this year, with broad-scale deployment in 2016. That said, the benefits for gaming and simultaneous video streams are just the tip of the iceberg. Look out for holographic displays, life logging, and ideas yet to be imagined.

Demand for pay TV – and the network infrastructure to support the digital home —is booming in emerging markets.

Market watchers predict that China will have 323 million pay-TV households by 2020, with India supplying a further 179 million. China, India and Japan will jointly account for two-thirds of the region’s $42 billion pay-TV revenues by 2020, according to Digital TV Research.

Broadcom has long showed its commitment to serving Chinese customers – and the fast-growing population of consumer electronics buyers there – with silicon targeting broadband rollouts, the Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Things, telecom and wearables markets. As such, company executives are in Asia this week to host more than 100 technology journalists and talk to them about the company’s strategies in the world’s most populous country.

At a media event this week, the company announced three “memorandum of understanding” agreements, or MOUs, which signify budding customer partnerships. Broadcom recently inked deals with three key companies in China, including StarTimes, a Beijing-based pay TV operator, Inspur Group, a Shandong-based systems integrator, and H3C Technologies Co., a Hangzhou-based networking company.

Broadcom is recognizing the increasing importance of China, not just as a place where products with its chips get assembled, but as a base for new customers, as well. Here’s just a few of its recent engagements with Chinese companies delivering innovative technologies in the region:

H3C Technologies, a leading provider of IP infrastructure products, will explore new market requirements for the next-wave of networking, including cloud-scale networking, software-defined networking and the “bring your own device” trend.

StarTimes and Broadcom are set to jointly define and develop set-top box offerings in Africa, which this month began the continent-wide switchover from analog broadcast to digital TV. Both sides will invest engineering resources to develop a series of low-cost set-top boxes and high-end Ultra HD home gateways.

The new partnerships couldn’t come at a better time. With market leadership in broadband, set-top box and Ultra HD silicon, Broadcom is enabling the next big battle ground in the competition for China’s consumers: how to get new content into their homes.

“North America’s overall market is nowhere near the size of China which has about 1.3 billion people, four times the size of the U.S.,” Deadline.com reported. “The potential reach for entertainment via any platform is vastly larger in China.”

That analysis follows a slew of recent deals for streaming new content into homes in China.

It’s clear that Ultra HD TV is coming to living rooms around the world.

As industry-watchers look ahead, so, too is Broadcom. The company is constantly innovating to anticipate the needs of operators and consumers alike as the market heads mainstream.

Not only is Broadcom helping Pay TV operators optimize their existing pipes to deliver 4K YouTube content over their networks, but also to offer support for YouTube and more features to their subscribers who are on the leading-edge of adoption.

The Ultra HD picture is coming together as retail prices for the pixel-dense sets continue to fall and content production is on the uptick, including efforts by Samsung, Sony, Netflix, YouTube and satellite operator DirecTV.

One of the ways leading cable and broadband providers can prepare is with a Broadcom-backed standard dubbed High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC), a video compression standard that slashes the required bandwidth of 4K streams so it can be deployed to consumers via a media gateway or set-top box.

In early 2013, Broadcom debuted the BCM7445, a flagship Ultra HD system-on-a-chip with encoding and decoding technology that made it possible for operators to deliver four times the amount of pixels with 50 percent bandwidth savings.

The BCM7445S offers VP9 decode support for speeds up to 60 frames per second, enabling consumers to stream 4K YouTube content to their set-top boxes and display on an Ultra HD TV.

“VP9 is the standard that YouTube wants providers to use for 4K content,” said Joseph Del Rio, product line director at Broadcom. “If you are a provisioner of YouTube content, then you would need a chip such as this to decode and display it.”

While consumers may not care about the speeds and feeds behind these standards, they’ll reap the benefits in the form of speedier 4K adoption with these new operator-provided advanced set-top boxes and gateways in their living rooms.

For operators, the compression technology lessens the burden on their networks and reduces the cost for the back-end upgrades needed to rollout 4K content to consumers.

And because more bandwidth means more simultaneous encoding and decoding, Broadcom’s technology enables them to offer a better experience to their subscribers, such as four HD picture-in-picture display and faster processing for 3-D graphics on user menus.

“We improved the memory bandwidth and utilization on the chip, enabling operators to do more activities simultaneously,” Del Rio said. “A second benefit of the improvement is that lower-speed DRAM can be employed, lowering the overall system cost.”

With fewer barriers to entry, the transition from high-definition (HD), 1080p resolution displays to 4K displays may happen a lot faster than the transition from standard-definition TV to HD, Del Rio said.

Global operators in emerging markets are getting ready to meet heftier bandwidth needs, too. The new system-on-a-chip from Broadcom follows close on the heels of an announcement last week of a series of HEVC chips for IP, satellite and cable operators for devices in emerging markets (the BCM73625, BCM75635, BCM75839 and BCM75848 are currently sampling.)

The Consumer Electronics Association predicts that at least a third of consumers expect to buy a new Ultra HD TV in the next three years. Sales of Ultra HD TVs are expected to hit four million in this year, up more than 200 percent from 2014.

From the show floor this week at ANGA COM in Cologne, Germany, where Broadcom is demonstrating its Ultra HD technologies and attendees are buzzing about next-gen TV-watching experiences, the move to Ultra HD is not a matter of “if” but when.

Broadcom’s on the leading edge to ensure that the delivery of 4K content, and the underpinning technology ecosystem, is in place to make the transition as smooth as possible.

To the average tech consumer, “eight-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO” may sound a bit like alphabet soup.

But for tech-savvy early adopters, power users and “pro-sumers”— who likely have more than a dozen wireless devices connected to their home wireless networks — it sounds less like a jumble of acronyms and more like music to their ears.

In a high-tech home, Wi-Fi networks are tasked with serving computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices and increasingly, home appliances such as light fixtures, audio systems and thermostats. Throw in a smart TV, and perhaps, a media gateway or set-top box that can send high-bandwidth, 4k content to an Ultra HD display, and consumers could face a serious slowdown on their home wireless network.

“Consumers are bringing more connected devices into their homes than ever before, which brings concerns about congestion on their networks and degraded performance,” said Manny Patel, senior director of product marketing, Wireless Connectivity, at Broadcom. “With 4k content coming down the pipeline, they need a robust ‘traffic cop’ to manage their household bandwidth needs.”

That brings us to MU-MIMO, which stands for multi-user, multiple input-multiple output. It’s an engineering feat that combines antenna and radio technologies to enable more connected devices to receive data simultaneously.

At Computex in Taipei this week, Broadcom made a big leap forward with a dual-band, eight-stream 5G WiFi platform for high-performance routers, which promises multi-gigabit downloads that make it the fastest router platform available today.

Broadcom is building upon its earlier generation MU-MIMO technology by doubling its throughput from four to eight concurrent streams. It also boosted capacity by enabling 5.4 Gbps aggregate download speeds on Wi-Fi operating in the 5 GHz band.

“The BCM47094 is an intelligent router platform that helps consumers more efficiently manage their networks for a better connectivity experience on all of their Wi-Fi-enabled devices,” Patel said.

The technology is sampling with customers today and is expected to appear on store shelves in the third quarter, which is good news for all the multi-device households out there.

The new router platform promises a much improved wireless experience, compared to the setup most people have in their homes today. Typically, WLAN (wireless local area network) routers send packets of data to one device (or user) at a time and default to the lowest-common denominator for downlink data transmission speeds. So, a household with a mix of older and newer devices won’t see the benefit of the higher range and faster throughput promised by 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

That means even legacy, non-MU-MIMO devices can benefit with a MU-MIMO Wi-Fi router because each device on the network gets more bandwidth as client gadgets get served as a group, instead of by turns.

In addition to benefiting crowded home networks, eight-stream MU-MIMO may come in handy in other heavily populated spots such as airports, convention centers and sports arenas.

By bringing tomorrow’s technology to the home network today, Broadcom is building the foundation that consumers need to get the most of their next-generation devices. A platform like this future-proofs home networks and will make the connected experience that much better in the years to come.

Ultra HD television sets are coming down in price and the industry is seeing an uptick in 4K content production, including efforts by Sony (in partnership with Netflix), Amazon, YouTube and satellite operator DirecTV.

DISH Joey 4K

Broadcom is collaborating behind the scenes with industry leaders, including DISH, on the missing piece: How to get all of that pixel-packed video into consumers’ living rooms via set-top boxes.

One of the ways leading pay-TV providers are doing that is with a standard called High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC), a video compression technology that cuts the required bandwidth of 4k streams in half.

At CES, DISH unveiled the 4K Joey, powered by the Broadcom® BCM7448 SoC processor. It plays back 4K video at 60 frames per second with 10-bit color and works with any 4K television that supports HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2. The 4K Joey is a companion set-top box that works with DISH’s Hopper. The Hopper acts as a media gateway, and the Joey is a streaming box for secondary TVs in other parts of the house.

The competition paired up editors from Reviewed.com with the Consumer Electronics Association — the industry trade group that runs the yearly CES event in Las Vegas. The Reviewed.com Editor’s Choice Awards seek to recognize debut products that were “particularly innovative, or striking in their technology, design, or value” across a dozen different categories, including automotive, cameras, gaming, health, home theater and televisions, among others.

“The Dish 4K Joey is a slim new set-top box capable of streaming 4K content from your Dish Hopper to anywhere else in your house. The sleek, super-slim device can be mounted almost anywhere, including behind your TV. Sports fans have even more reason to cheer—the 4K Joey has enough bandwidth to stream two simultaneous full-HD sporting events side-by-side.”

The tech media and other gadget reviewers also had good things to say about the 4K Joey, including CNET, Gizmag, and Venture Beat.

Broadcom’s lineup of Ultra HD SoCs include the BCM7252, BCM7444, BCM7445 and BCM7448.

LAS VEGAS — As the International Consumer Electronics Show wraps up, there’s always some regret among attendees about what they may have missed. To help out those who might have missed Broadcom’s headlines, we dispatched a team of Blog Squadders to the Broadcom booth for a close-up look at some of this year’s top technologies.

Here’s what they found:

Wireless Charging Gets Real: It’s been a long time coming, but a universal wireless charging solution is closer than ever now that Broadcom’s standard-agnostic wireless charging chipset is on display. In the video below, Reinier van der Lee, director of product marketing, shows how Broadcom’s transceiver and receiver chips could work with a smartphone, tablet or wearable device.

Bluetooth Goes Big: Bluetooth, a longtime staple of headsets and stereos, is seeing new uses in some nifty toys. Featured at Broadcom’s booth was the Jamstik, a portable electric guitar for both pro musicians and amateurs that plays music via an iOS-enabled smartphones or tablet. Inside the Jamstik is Broadcom WICED™ Smart platform with Bluetooth connectivity, In this video, Chris Heille of Jamstik’s parent company Zivix, rocks out:

… And Also, Small: Also featuring WICED low-energy Bluetooth tech is the Nod Ring, a device that can act as an extremely versatile, gesture-based remote control for everything from changing the channel on a Smart TV to, as demonstrated in the video below, a controller for virtual reality gaming.

Drone Home: Broadcom partner Parrot showed off a menagerie of drones for hobbyists (some which flew, some which hopped, and other that appeared to have all-terrain abilities). They tap Broadcom’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology to enable users to control them with smartphones and tablets. Some of Parrot’s drones come equipped with cameras that can stream high-def video in real time during their wanderings, and Parrot Chief Technical Officer Guillaume Pinto explained that it is the strength of Broadcom’s 5G WiFi technology that allows that transmission to occur.

LAS VEGAS — Before I was hired to be part of Broadcom’s Blog Squad at the International Consumer Electronics Show this week, I hadn’t really given much thought to how much or how often an embedded semiconductor company touches our lives.

Home automation technology on display at the Broadcom booth at CES 2015.

I quickly discovered that Broadcom’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips and other connection wizardry reside in the mechanical closets of most of our gadgets. That includes phones, computers, set top boxes, game consoles, dongles — really any electronic device that wants to send and receive information—as well as the back-end networking equipment that transmits data to and from data centers.

I don’t care about the specs in my iPhone, Chromebook, Roku, or any other gadget I own. I just want their apps to work. For that to happen, I need a robust connection at home and work that’s smart enough to handle the growing number of concurrent users and devices all working together to clog the intertubes.

Earlier this week, Broadcom unveiled a suite of 5G WiFi-enabled router products designed to bring 802.11ac performance to the modern home Wi-Fi router or workhorse enterprise access points so that speedier, bandwidth-busting hubs can better serve every connected device.

Here are five reasons everyone should care about smarter, faster, wider-ranging and multi-user Wi-Fi:

1. It overcomes grainy video streams. I’m fortunate to have Google Fiber in my home. But the included 802.11n router is ill-suited for the task when several video streams or devices jump on the network. This is because old routers weren’t meant to handle the amount of devices we connect to them now. That, and they’re incapable of throttling older or distant devices that are hogging bandwidth, power, and signals as the access point attempts to maintain a connection with them. This is particularly troubling for video streams, one Broadcom engineer told me, which explains the lag I experience when my kids log on to Netflix while my wife and I use other Internet applications.

2. It supports multiple users. Because not all Web traffic is equal, the Internet can sometimes slow down, depending on the applications others are using on the network at the same time. “Wi-Fi is a lot like highway lanes,” Broadcom’s Ananda Roy, a wireless applications software engineer, told me this week. “5G WiFi widens those lanes and adds more of them so your newer devices don’t get stuck behind slow devices or in rush hour traffic.” I was unable to test the experience at home, but there’s no reason to believe the technology isn’t a significant improvement over my 802.11n router.

3. It plays nice with existing devices. Not only are 5G WiFi routers backward-compatible with older wireless devices, chances are, anything you’ve bought in the last three years already supports the standard. That means next-gen Wi-Fi is available today for less than it cost when it was released several years ago. Buying a new wireless router is anything but a status purchase, “but it improves the quality of experience of all the devices we love,” Roy said.

4. It has better range and wall throughput. That’s a fancy way of saying 5G WiFi offers better coverage and signal strength to the devices you connect, whether they’re in the corner room upstairs, the basement downstairs, or passing through concrete walls at the office. In short, 5G WiFi lets you do more with the internet you already have because it manages multiple devices better, while future-proofing your home or office network.

5. It downloads and transfers data 5x faster. Even though I get gigabit internet at home when wired in, I only get 200 mbps on wireless. First world problems, I know. But I’m paying for a Gig. Shouldn’t my router support it and all the glorious transfer speeds, downloads, and uploads that come with it? With 802.11ac Wave 2 routers, the answer is yes. And according to Broadcom’s Manny Patel, 5GWiFi performance is up to 40 percent faster than older variations of Wi-Fi.

Reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I’m Blake Snow. Thanks for reading. May all your connections be speedy this year.

“As we begin to use the Internet and other services more, the pipe going into the home needs to get bigger and bigger,” said Jay Kirchoff, vice president of marketing in the Broadband & Connectivity Group at Broadcom.

“A couple of years ago you probably had two or three devices in your home that consumed the Internet,” Kirchoff said. “Next year, it’s probably going to be up to 50 devices in the home that will want Internet access.”

Inside the Broadcom Booth: The new BCM93390 demonstrates download speeds of more than 4 Gbps.

Multi-gigabit-per-second networks to the home aren’t all that common in the United States, outside of cities that are serviced by Google Fiber. Typically, a home connection delivers broadband speeds in the 20 Mbps range with costly higher-tier packages topping out at 505 Mbps.

In the past, the options for getting close to one gigabit-per-second network speeds on cable networks at home were few and far between, mainly due to the cost of upgrading the infrastructure.

But that’s starting to change with the recent rollout of a standard dubbed DOCSIS 3.1, which is set to enable multi-gigabit speeds via cable modems in consumers’ homes. Broadcom is the first silicon vendor to offer up a cable modem system-on-a-chip that’s DOCSIS 3.1-ready.

So what does this mean for the everyday cable consumer?

Generally, it means more smartphones, tablets and laptops can happily coexist on the same home broadband network without any slowdown in performance, given that network speeds above 1 Gbps can support more devices connected on a single home network with faster, more reliable service.

On the operator side, the cable modem-on-a-chip makes it easier and less costly for broadband service providers to implement gigabit speeds.

In the video below, Kirchoff demonstrates how the new BCM93390 manages download speeds of more than 4 Gbps.

LAS VEGAS — Once again, this week’s International Consumer Electronics Show is highlighting big trends around the living room television experience. But in addition to thousands of TVs packed with pixels or screens with sleek curves, some of the excitement this year is focused on the familiar set-top box.

Responsible for delivering content to the viewer’s screen, the traditional set-top box (STB) is not only shrinking in size but also gaining new capabilities, bringing new life to a class of palm-sized, plug-and-play streaming devices that deliver cable programming as well as video content over Wi-Fi without the clutter of an extra box and even more wires.

This year’s CES marks a turning point for handheld “over the top” (OTT) devices that can offer up both cable and streaming content from the Internet. The first-generation versions of these boxes encountered some technical challenges, such as power consumption and security, and lacked the ability for subscribers to access their existing cable subscription content.

With cable operators and service providers looking to bring both cable access and streaming capabilities in these smaller form factors to their subscribers, Broadcom is improving the technology so it meets operator-grade quality and offers a top-notch experience for viewers.

Broadcom’s set-top box technology enables multi-service operators and the ability to offer their customers a powerful Wi-Fi set-top box – in a slimmer package—that doesn’t force a tradeoff between security and performance.

The BCM7250 is targeted at puck-sized set-top boxes, popular among OTT streaming media players such as Roku and Apple TV. The BCM72502 is specifically designed for HDMI stick or “dongle” applications that plug into a port on the side of the TV.

Together, they offer a slew of improvements over existing solutions out there. Some features include:

A powerful 3-D graphics engine with 3000 DMIPS CPU

Integrated support for Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) 2.0

PCIe 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity in 2×2 and 4×4 MIMO configurations

Conditional access capability

Supports Android, Chromium, DIAL, DLNA CVP2, Miracast™ protocols

HEVC compression for better bandwidth management

Ditch the Extra Wires

Broadcom’s small form-factor set-top box technology eliminates the need for a power cable, because a dongle built upon the BCM72502 can draw power directly from the TV.

That’s because it supports the Mobile High Definition Link 2.0 interface, which enables small form-factor STBs to achieve high performance in terms of browser, graphics and applications capabilities, while also offering wireless connectivity using the 802.11ac standard.

When you pair that with an 802.11ac chip, consumers can brush up against carrier-level throughput at 960 Mbps. That means binge-watching sessions get a boost to high-definition content that no longer gets bogged down by buffering.

Secure Content Options

For operators, existing streaming sticks don’t offer enough protection for the delivery of premium content to their customers. Broadcom’s STB tech includes a high level of encryption, including conditional access capability and Broadcom’s digital rights management software.

Consumers can get the best of both worlds: They can access all of the free over-the-top applications on demand, and operators get the security of a traditional STB and can protect their premium cable content all in the same box, puck or dongle.

TV-watchers are coming to re-define the old axiom of getting content “anytime, anywhere.” That “anywhere” is really the living room, where they expect to call up a limitless buffet of Internet streaming content, social media channels and premium broadcast options (think: 24 hour cable news or ‘round-the-clock football games) on command.

Broadcom’s giving it to them with some of the most powerful streaming set-top box technology in a design that brings clutter-free, seamless connectivity experience to the home with the smallest form factor around.